Generating traffic by forum posting

Hi, do you guys utilize forum posting for traffic generation?

I found it extremely effective, especially if I post on the forum because I like it. When I help members a lot of them visit my site and become my regular readers, so it is a win-win scenario .

 

Yep.

I don't find it to be the most successful, but it's something I can do for indirect marketing.

What I mean is, if I really enjoy a forum or I'm gaining a lot of information, then that's my main purpose and benefit. If I can get a trickle of traffic from my signature links and whatnot in the process, then it's all icing on the cake.

 

Well, I dont think you would find too many regular readers. A few visitors on a regular basis might be something which would be more logical. I dont find visitors being regular on the forums so how can I expect them to be regular visitors for my site? of course, a couple of subscribers may happen, if your website caters to what they are looking for.

 

SEO is over-rated. Millions of sites all optimized for the same keywords. Useless.

Quality original content eats SEO for lunch. What I do is to attack the so-called "experts" with as many bullets as I can fire. Ultimately, people come to forums to argue, not to agree on everything. Being the 70,000th ranked forum that agrees with every forum ranked higher doesn't do any good. Being the one forum that bucks the trend and breaks the chain of agreement does. But only if you have a cogent argument. Simply disagreeing for the sake of being different isn't enough.

 

I guess you don't receive very much search engine traffic to be thinking like that.

I create forum posts to generate traffic, but I don't rely on it, because it'd take forever for my forum to grow if that's all I did.

 

You mean write articles and posts on your forum that attack the 'experts' in the niche and give controversial opinions?

Because I have to say, you're probably on to something there. In the gaming niche, many of my own most read articles are those which rip some popular game or system to shreds, and I once had a video on Youtube which reached a few hundred thousand views by the same means.

It's also one of the reasons someone in the gaming world called 'Sean Malstrom' got popular and became a controversial figure, he basically attacked what everyone considered common knowledge, ripped apart products everyone liked and tore apart many things considered standard in the industry. Got him quite a few readers initially, as well as an absolute ton of hate mail.

Yeah, if you can stomach the inevitable personal attacks and criticisms, you can definitely bring in a lot of traffic by being as controversial as possible and being devil's advocate.

 

SEO is effective for forums who sell products. Where SEO fails is in that search engines index forums with or without SEO. The educated forum administrator uses meta data and tags which make his or her forum unique from the countless others in the same niche. As an experiment, several years ago I ran two forums identical in every manner excepting the URLs, one with vBSEO and one without. Each drew the same number of search engine spiders from the same IP addresses and indexed the same Google maps. Then I posted original content in the forum without SEO. That forum had more hits than the one with only duplicate content and vBSEO. I'm not certain what you consider to be "very much" search engine traffic but the forum itself now has 75,000 active members and over 9,000,000 posts. It receives thousands of crawls per day.

 

The inevitable criticisms are what draw members. Members don't join forums to become shiny happy people holding hands. People like to argue and to prove their superior knowledge of the topics to others. Allow me to educate you on my superior knowledge of these topics. I know everything. Just ask me. And if you are wrong I will let you know in no uncertain terms. Arguments generate traffic. And trolls and baiting and flaming. But the traffic is important. Everything else can be kept within moderation.

 

I disagree. SEO is good for driving traffic to your forum. It just requires patience, hard work, and dedication which is something that most people don't have so they give up before they gain the benefits from SEO.

I can't really explain your experiment though, maybe it's because the forum with the duplicate content had more content or traffic to begin with, domain age, trust with google...I don't know. I believe in SEO that's all I know, and I'm doing what's working for me.

 

It really depends on the target market for your site specifically and the forum yourself. If you post on a forum you enjoy and have a site that has the same target audience, then yes I agree its a win/win situation.

 

As long as you are posting in a relevant niche forum, then yes, it can have a good effect. If not, there are chances that the members may take it as spamming.

 

Yup, especially if you help out other users and give some advice sometimes. People will click on your signature based on what you bring to the table.

 

People are curious. If they find what you write worthwhile or interesting they'll check you out. The more active you are on the forum the better too.

As for long term members or content on your site or even ad revenue, don't hold your breath.

 

I've been doing a lot of forum posting on a same genre forum as mine, not got any registered members yet from the signatures I've been using

- www.chatarena.org

 

It takes time. You can't build a community over night. Members won't join your forum just because you have a forum in the same niche. They have to "like" your forum to join it, give them a reason to become a member.

Why would they join your forum over your competitors? What do you offer them?

 

That's really an important question to ask regardless. Whether you're posting on a forum to try to get people to join or you're promoting in some other location....you have to give them a reason to join. They need to feel compelled to go through the registration process and continue coming back to the site time and time again. They won't do it simply because they see a link somewhere.

 

This thread alone has signature links to a cooking blog, a poker site, a general discussion forum, a virtual pets forum and a twitter account. Do you think it has much value to someone wanting to promote a home decor blog? Google isn't going to think this page is about all of those things so I doubt it.

That's a danger when you link in signatures, you can't control who else has a link on the page and you have no clue what they are linking to. User beware!

 

Google really couldn't care less, though, because those links are almost always no-follow. They don't think the page is about all of those and they have no interest in even following those links. They can recognize forums and realize when a link is in a signature as well. I really don't think sigs are much use at all in search engines much these days. They can be quite valuable when real users are seeing them, though.

 

I find paid posting to be fairly useless. I invested a whole lot via PostLoop and yielded poor results across all the sites tested. I believe the one site I invested $5,000 into paid posting, then more $ into adwords and link campaigns.

In the end, that one specific site I shut down. I had to stop investing at some point.

Now I have used paid posting on other sites and again, a waste.

I suggest you hit up e-lance, craigs list, odesk etc and find someone to write articles for you, cheap! The posts / articles you will get are more targeted and interesting than a bunch of post loopers talking circles with each other in threads.